E380800B. The Seraphim.
The Metropolitan Magazine, August 1838, pp. 97–101.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 383–385.
At our first glance at this extraordinary little book, we were singularly struck with the originality, ideality, earnestness, and masterly power of expression and execution; and a more careful examination has deepened this first impression, and awakened in us a great respect for the fair author’s uncommon learning. Whether she be qualified to split critical straws with a Parr or a Porson we know not, but she seems well read in the Greek poets, and perfectly imbued with their spirit. We should also infer that she is as familiar with German as with Grecian poetry—or at least we fancy that we trace in many passages a half inspiration derived from the immortal Goethe. With the old poets of England, from Spenser downwards, she has evidently a most perfect acquaintance, and a truly scholar-like familiarity. The style and manner resulting from this combination remind us more of Shelley than of any other recent English writer. But there is a devotional glow, an almost seraph-like enthusiasm in this lady, which the unfortunate Shelley never reached,—though, be it said, that much misunderstood man—that generous and glorious intellect—had a wonderful devotion in his very unbelief. With him it was only a mistake about names. He worshipped God with a soul-exalting worship in the mountains and seas, in the blue sky, the green forest, in the veriest stock and stone around him; and everything in his imagination was sublime and godlike. There is also here and there a happily reflected light from the great and good Wordsworth; and one or two of Miss Barrett’s minor pieces might be mistaken for the productions of the greatest of our poets since Milton. Now and then a conception, the hint of a great thought, is taken up and expanded. This seems to be the case, for example, in the following beautiful lines, which will recall to every worshipper of Wordsworth the “Sonnet of London,” and the expression of “mighty heart” applied to the great city.
I dwell amid the city.
The great humanity which beats
Its life along the stony streets,
Like a strong unsunned river
In a self-made course, is ever
Rolling on, rolling on! [p. 98→]
We cannot quite agree with this truly-gifted writer that the awful mysteries of the christian faith are suited to mortal verse—we remember that even a Milton could here make the sublime ridiculous, or something worse—but we admire with a heart-warm admiration her intentions in this way; and the all-absorbing enthusiasm with which she advocates the cause of devotional poetry. The following passages are magnificently expressed: they are specimens of poetry of the highest order without its rhythm.
“‘An irreligious poet,’ says Burns, meaning an undevotional one, ‘is a monster.’ An irreligious poet, he might have said, is no poet at all. The gravitation of poetry is upwards. The poetic wing, if it move, ascends. What did even the heathen Greeks—Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Pindar? Sublimely, because born poets; darkly, because born of Adam, and unrenewed in Christ, their spirits wandered like the rushing chariots and winged horses, black and white, of their brother poet Plato, through the universe of Deity, seeking if haply they might find him: and as that universe closed around the seekers, not with the transparency in which it flowed first from his hand, but opaquely, as double-dyed with the transgression of its sons; they felt, though they could not discern, the God beyond, and used the gesture, though ignorant of the language of worshipping. The blind eagle missed the sun, but soared towards its sphere. Shall the blind eagle soar, and the seeing eagle peck chaff? Surely it should be the gladness and the gratitude of such as are poets among us, that in turning towards the beautiful, they may behold the true face of God.”
After mentioning that the subject of the principal poem (The Seraphim) in this collection was suggested to her when she was engaged upon her translation of the “Prometheus Bound,” Miss Barrett continues in this lofty strain—
“I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem where none had any pity; from the ‘faded white flower’ of the Titanic brow, to the ‘withered grass’ of a Heart trampled on by its own beloved; from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublimer meekness of the taster of death for every man; from the taunt stung into being from the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love! And I thought how, ‘from the height of this great argument,’ the scenery of the Prometheus would have dwarfed itself even in the eyes of its poet,—how the fissures of his rocks and the innumerous smiles of his ocean would have closed and waned into blankness,—and his demigod stood confest, so human a conception as to fall below the aspiration of his own humanity. He would have turned from such to the rent rocks and darkened sun—rent and darkened by a sympathy thrilling through nature, but leaving man’s heart untouched—to the multitudes, whose victim was their Saviour—to the Victim, whose sustaining thought beneath an unexampled agony was not the Titanic ‘I can revenge,’ but the celestial ‘I can forgive?’
* * * * * *
“I have worn no shoes upon this holy ground: I have stood there, but have not walked. I have drawn no copy of the statue of this Great Pan,—but have caught its shadow,—shortened in the dawn of my imperfect knowledge, and distorted and broken by the unevenness of our earthly ground. I have written no work, but a suggestion. Nor has even so little been attempted, without as deep a consciousness of weakness as the severest critic and the humblest Christian could desire to impress upon me. I have felt, in the midst of my own thoughts upon my own theme, like Homer’s ‘children in a battle.’
“The agents in this poem of imperfect form—a dramatic lyric, rather than a lyrical drama—are those mystic beings who are designated in Scripture the Seraphim. The subject has thus assumed a character of exaggerated difficulty, the full sense of which I have tried to express in my Epilogue. But my desire was, to gather some vision of the supreme spectacle under a less usual aspect,—to glance at it, as dilated in seraphic eyes, and darkened and deepened by the near association with blessedness and heaven. Are we not too apt to measure the depth of the Saviour’s [p. 99→] humiliation from the common estate of man, instead of from his own peculiar and primeval one? To avoid which error, I have endeavoured to count some steps of the ladder at Bethel,—a very few steps, and as seen between the clouds.
“And thus I have endeavoured to mark in my two seraphic personages, distinctly and predominantly, that shrinking from and repugnance to, evil, which, in my weaker Seraph, is expressed by fear, and, in my stronger one, by a more complex passion; in order to contrast with such, the voluntary debasement of him who became lower than the angels, and touched in his own sinless being, sin, and sorrow, and death. In my attempted production of such a contrast, I have been true to at least my own idea of angelic excellence, as well as to that of his perfection. For one holiness differs from another holiness in glory. To recoil from evil, is according to the stature of an angel; to subdue it, is according to the infinitude of a God.”
Coleridge might have written or spoken these words in one of his rapt moments, when he was three parts in heaven. The poem to which they refer, though the longest and most substantial in the book, is not, to our tastes, the best. It contains, however, passages of feeling and lofty imagination which, perhaps, no two, certainly no three of our living poets could surpass. We regret to say that the last line of all is a striking specimen of bathos—a negligence, or a slip, calculated to excite a familiar, mean, and ridiculous idea. The earthly garment of the Saviour was rolled “in red blood,” in order that the feeble, the frail, and the faint, according to this unhappy expression,
Before his heavenly throne should walk in white.
The next piece in the volume, entitled the “Poet’s Vow,” is exquisite, and all but perfect; and the same may be said of the “Romaunt of Margaret,” “Isobel’s Child,” “The Devoted Garden,” [sic] “The Soul’s Travelling,” and the “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans.”
As our extracts must be of the shortest, we have chosen the following, to give some faint idea of a truly original and gifted author, whose works, we trust, will soon be as well known and as warmly admired as they deserve to be.
MEMORY AND HOPE.
Back-looking Memory
And Hope prophetic sprang from out the ground!
One, where the flashing of cherubic sword
Fell downward, sad and broad;
And one, from Eden earth, within the sound
Of the four rivers lapsing pleasantly,
What time the promise after curse was said—
“Thy seed shall bruise his head.”
Memory is very wild,
As moon-struck by cherubic flashings near,
When she was born! Her deep eyes shine and shone
With light that conquereth sun,
And stars to wanner paleness year by year.
With sweetest scents, she mixeth things defiled—
She trampleth down earth’s grasses green and sweet,
With her far-wandering feet.
She plucketh many flowers,
Their beauty on her bosom’s coldness killing;
She teacheth every melancholy sound
To winds and waters round;
She droppeth tears with seed, where man is tilling
The rugged soil in yet more rugged hours;
She smileth—ah me! in her smile doth go
A mood of deeper woe! [p. 100→]
Hope seemed of happier sprite.
Crowned with an Eden wreath she saw not fade,
She went a nodding through the wilderness—
With brow that shone no less
Than sea-bird wings, by storm more frequent made—
Searching the treeless rock for fruits of light;
Her white feet being armed from stones and cold
By slippers all of gold!
And Memory did her wrong,
And, while she dreamed, her slippers stole away!
But still she wended on, with mirth unheeding,
The while her feet were bleeding;
Until she met her on a certain day,
And with her evil eyes did search her long
And cruelly, whereat she sank to ground
In a stark deadly swound.
And so my Hope were slain,
Had it not been that thou were standing near,
O Thou! who saidst “live” to spirits lying
In thine own blood, and dying!
For Thou her forehead to thine heart didst rear,
And make its silent pulses sing again,—
Pouring a new light o’er her darkened eyne,
With tender tears from Thine!
Therefore my Hope arose
From out her swound, and gazed upon Thy face!
And meeting there that soft subduing look
Which Peter’s spirit shook,
Sank downwards in a rapture to embrace
Thy pierced hands and feet with kisses close,
And prayed Thee to assist her evermore
To “reach the things before.”
Then gavest Thou the smile
Whence angel wings thrill quick like summer lightning;
Vouchsafing rest beside Thee, where she never
From Love and Faith may sever!
Whereat the Eden crown she saw not whitening,
A time ago, though whitening all the while,
Reddened with life, to hear the voice which talked
To Adam as he walked!
VICTORIA’S TEARS.
Hark! the reiterated clangour sounds!
Now mariners, like the sea or like the storm,
Or like the flames on forests, move and mount
From rank to rank, and loud and louder roll;
Till all the people is one vast applause.
Landor’s Gebir.
O maiden! heir of kings!
A king has left his place!
The majesty of Death has swept
All other from his face!
And thou upon thy mother’s breast,
No longer lean adown,
But take the glory for the rest,
And rule the land that loves thee best!
She heard and wept—
She wept, to wear a crown! [p. 101→]
They decked her courtly halls;
They reined her hundred steeds;
They shouted at her palace gate,
A noble Queen succeeds!
Her name has stirred the mountain’s sleep,
Her praise has filled the town!
And mourners God had stricken deep,
Looked hearkening up, and did not weep.
Alone she wept—
Who wept to wear a crown!
She saw no purple shine,
For tears had dimmed her eyes;
She only knew her childhood’s flowers
Were happier pageantries!
And while her heralds played the part,
For million shouts to drown—
“God save the Queen!” from hill to mart,
She heard through all her beating heart,
And turned and wept—
She wept, to wear a crown!
God save thee, weeping Queen!
Thou shalt be well beloved!
The tyrant’s sceptre cannot move,
As those pure tears have moved!
The nature in thine eyes we see,
That tyrants cannot own—
The love that guardeth liberties:
Strange blessing in the nation lies,
Whose sovereign wept—
Yea! wept to wear its crown!
God bless thee, weeping Queen.
With blessing more divine!
And fill with happier love than earth’s
That tender heart of thine!
That when the thrones of earth shall be
As low as graves brought down;
A pierced hand may give to thee
The crown which angels shout to see!
Thou wilt not weep
To wear that heavenly crown!
Reviewed:
The Seraphim, and Other Poems (EBB), London: Saunders & Otley, 1838.
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